Ah yes, *THOSE* people, the same people who can take a rock solid stable computer and make it BSOD in under 5 seconds. Please, 9/10 when I hear whining about MSE it is from someone who has screwed up their computer beyond belief.

Not at all. My computer hardly ever crashes, I just dislike MSE because it's always seemed to me to be a resource hog.

[First off, a disclaimer: I work at a competitor to Microsoft in the anti-malware space, so please keep that bias in mind when reading my reply. AG]

Hello,

As far as core features like prevention and removal goes, Microsoft's anti-malware line (Microsoft Security Essentials/Windows Defender, Forefront/Intune) are fairly decent choices.

Where the free offerings tend to fall down are on the features like configurability (high-granularity of features), remote management, centralized logging and so forth. There's also a matter of things like design philosophies (what techniques and technologies the company uses in architecting its software), employee allocation (which affects the product in various ways), threat prioritization and the like which make subtle (but often noticeable) difference in how an anti-malware program operates.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

I have to think that they left out some bits from MSE in defender for windows 8 so the rest of the antivirus companies didn't cry antitrust.

In my experience, MSE and the Defender in win8 both use way less resources than anything else I've tried.

As many people have pointed out, why would you need to manually scan a file, since it is:
- Scanned upon download / creation
- Scanned when you go into the folder in explorer
- Before it is opened/executed both through explorer, windows start menu, windows run dialog or through other programs directly